Responsible travel policy – Green travel

Responsible Travel is number one priority to Geotrend operations. We design and run our Georgia tours in a way that provides the positive impact and long-term economic benefit to the local communities, as well as opportunities to conserve and improve the environment.

Economic responsibility:

• We aim to develop long-term relationships with our partners within the country so that the economic benefit is ongoing.
• Sightseeing tours are operated and led only by local guides and drivers.
• We encourage clients to buy, if they intend to, handmade souvenirs, traditional Georgian wine, and other products from the small local artisans and winemakers.
• We use locally owned hotels, small family owned guest-houses.
• Where possible, dining experiences are based around local produce and local cultural traditions.
• We offer tour activities that aim at supporting private attempts in agriculture: farm visits, Georgian tea making, tangerine harvesting, etc.  
• We aim to provide financial and in-kind support for economic, social or environmental projects that will benefit the local communities.

Environmental responsibility:

• We aim to ensure that type and scale of our traveling groups are appropriate to local conditions and does not overload local infrastructure.
• We aim to achieve zero litter policies everywhere.
• We provide our travelers with free ‘responsible traveler kit’ that includes re-usable water bottle, and bamboo-made toothbrush.
• We aim to work closely with Georgian Eco-tourism Association to help preserve or improve the environment and deliver a long-term benefit for the host community.
• We employ eco-friendly vehicles with hybrid engines, or environmental friendly modern exhaust systems.
• We no longer offer Dolphinarium visits in Batumi, and encourage our guests not to do so on their own time.
• We are working on developing a series of “Georgia by rail” tour programs to reduce domestic plane and vehicle traveling, as much as possible.
• We aim to work closely with H2Otel project by UNDP in Georgia in environmental friendly accommodation selection for our tours.  
• We are running our Tbilisi office in a responsible manner by using fair-trade products, monitoring, and where possible reducing, our energy usage, as well as recycling.
• We will be providing regular trainings in the principles and practices of responsible travel, both to our office staff and those employed directly or indirectly throughout the country.
• Together with Georgian Ecotourism Association we work on improving our ecotourism standards. 

Social responsibility:

• We support Treepex organizations’ “Georgian oak rehabilitation” initiative by putting aside a percentage of our income from the tours.
• We prioritize those with higher level of environmental awareness among local service providers.
• We aim to support the MyWine project of conservation and development of limited indigenous vines in Georgia.
• We aim to support “Travel with Impact” initiative in Georgia by Sustainable rural development international LTD.